Inflation has hit the jackpot. Mega Millions, a national lottery game, plans to more than double the price of a lottery ticket in April 2025. The price hike is part of an overhaul of the game that is expected to improve players’ odds and give away big jackpots more frequently.
In April, Mega Millions ticket prices will rise from $2 to $5. It’s the first price hike since 2017, when the game was last revamped. The game’s administrators hope there will be a big enough payoff to keep players interested.
“We expect more billion-dollar jackpots than ever before,” Joshua Johnston, lead director of the Mega Millions Consortium, said in an Oct. 7 news release.
The overhaul also promises:
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Better odds of winning the jackpot.
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Larger starting jackpots.
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Players will always win more than the cost of the ticket.
Additionally, instead of paying an extra $1 for a multiplier that increases the prize for matching all five white balls (but not the mega ball), it’ll be applied automatically. That means every non-jackpot win could be increased by up to $10 million.
The Mega Millions announcement doesn’t explain how the odds will improve with the overhaul in 2025. But that would be a reversal of the major changes in 2017, when Mega Millions altered the lottery formula and made it harder to win the jackpot. In part, that’s how big lottery jackpots became more common. Mega Millions awarded its first billion-dollar jackpot in 2018, and five more have followed since then.
It appears that helped fuel public interest in playing the lottery. U.S. lottery players spent more than $113.3 billion on tickets in 2023, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. That’s up from $73.8 billion in 2015.
Mega Millions can be played in 45 U.S. states, as well as Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Drawings take place twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. To win the jackpot, players pick five numbers between 1 and 70, and a sixth number between 1 and 25. Right now, the odds of picking the winning numbers are roughly 1 in 303 million.
